Editorial policy

This page states the rules we hold ourselves to. It applies to every article on the site, sponsored or not.

Separation of commercial and editorial

Commercial arrangements are agreed before work starts and never after a conclusion is reached. The person who negotiates a sponsorship does not write, edit or approve the article it funds. Where a sponsored article reaches a conclusion favourable to the sponsor, the independence sign-off records that the conclusion did not change as a result of the arrangement.

Authorship and review

Every article carries two names: an author and a reviewer. The author assembles the evidence and writes the draft. The reviewer checks that each factual claim traces to a cited source and that the scoring follows the published methodology. A reviewer may reject a draft; the author may not overrule a rejection.

Sources

A claim that can be checked must be linked. Fee schedules, terms of service and regulatory filings are cited to the document itself, with the date accessed. Claims we cannot source are either removed or explicitly marked as our own assessment.

Sponsorship disclosure

Sponsored articles display a disclosure at the top of the page, naming the sponsor and stating that the sponsor had no editorial input. The disclosure is rendered from the same field that drives the structured data, so the two cannot drift apart.

Corrections

When we get something wrong we correct the article and record the correction. We do not silently edit. The corrections log lists what changed, when, and why.

What we will not publish

We will not publish a ranking of vendors we have not assessed. We will not publish a review without a named, linkable source. We will not publish an article whose only basis is a vendor's own marketing material.